The Nuclear Threat-The Religious Response: A Special Section
THE NUCLEAR THREAT: THE RELIGIOUS RESPONSE A FOREWORD FROM THE EDITORS How to think about a nuclear freeze? It's easier not to think about it, to take refuge in whichever set of current cliches...
...Some of us believe that the best way to give bite to that "no" is to depend on deterrence, a doctrine that stretches very far back, well beyond the advent of nuclear weapons...
...What is to be envied—or, better, admired, since one ought not covet one's neighbors' prose—is the intelligence, the grace, the elegant sobriety of their grappling...
...a piercing consciousness of the possiblity of wholesale destruction is not our constant companion...
...And that is one of the reasons we support a mutual and verifiable freeze, and then reduction...
...But the truth is that the argument is not about aesthetics...
...No, the debate at its best is between two visions of how the world and this nation may best be protected...
...Perhaps...
...We are for it not because we have considered all the alternatives to an endless arms race and have concluded that among them all, the freeze is best...
...To read the report in its entirety is to understand that such envy is misplaced...
...Standing behind the flower children are Jerome Weisner and William Colby and dozens of Nobel laureates, and it would be—it is—a terrible mistake to suppose that they are governed by sloppy sentiment...
...We have in mind, of course, the financial costs, the grotesque diversion of human energies and of human resources from the pressing problems of mankind—here at home and abroad— that our insistence on ever more sophisticated weapons and delivery systems involves...
...Which may help explain why there is, in this debate, so much reliance on slogans and symbols...
...Who can resist their sweetness, their benign balloons, who can possibly prefer the situation room to the public park, the bomb to the rainbow...
...While the folk song is surely—in this context—an inadequate response to the computer, the battle is scarcely summarized by its symbols...
...The concentric circles that stretch out from ground zero embrace us all, one way or another...
...We find the argument wanting, the threat of periodic destabi-lization, of irrationality, of error, human or mechanical, far more persuasive...
...To be sure, most of us go through our daily activities much as our forebears did before the atom was split...
...In fact, of course, they have not been silent...
...So take your pick...
...The pro-freeze people win the aesthetic argument hands down...
...Perhaps all this will prove a fad...
...But there are other costs, less tangible, that are specific to the nuclear age, and that are at least as disturbing...
...The choice, after all, is not between the caricatured extremes, between Dr...
...We leave it to others, far more expert than we, to propose the method, the most plausible way to say no at this time...
...Finally, we turn to our own community...
...The likelihood is that all of us would end up incinerated or vaporized or radiated to death in the event of a general war...
...We hope not...
...All of us say no to nuclear war...
...And, as Howard Bray makes clear in his review of Jewish communal behavior, we have lately begun to speak up and out as Jews...
...Standing there, these days, means standing in debt to the distinguished bishops of the Catholic Church whose recent pastoral letter received so much publicity...
...Nor, as the anti-freeze people would have it, is it between sobriety and romance, between realism and fantasy...
...For it seems to us that there are important ways in which the very threat of nuclear destruction imposes intolerable, unacceptable costs upon us all...
...So we are for the freeze...
...It's easier not to think about it, to take refuge in whichever set of current cliches is more compatible with your general outlook and disposition...
...Such a war would be—as both Arthur Waskow and Father Theodore Hesburgh have independently said—a "reversal of Creation," the ultimate blasphemy, the ultimate obscenity...
...Nor is it between toughness and mush...
...How many of us, if and when we do stop to think of these things, or even just to feel them, believe that it will be given to our children and to theirs to live out their lives in the fullness of time...
...Strangelove and Pangloss...
...When the letter was finally agreed to, there were some Jews who remarked that they envied the Church its hierarchical structure, which permits a magestirial declaration that commands the attention of the faithful...
...As bad a mistake as to insist that the antifreeze people have hearts of stone...
...Is it so very irrational for a young person today to wonder whether he or she has the right to bring children into this leaking ark...
...That is not to say that we agree in every aspect with the letter...
...And, if it is not, might the very threat of the bomb not be a barrier to life...
...This perception is not fundamentally related to the nuclear age per se, since it is at least arguable that the full development of conventional forces and weapons Would be as expensive, or perhaps even more expensive than our present course...
...on both sides—better, on all sides, for there are more than two—Jews are among the most prominent actors...
...Perhaps intense concern for humankind's destiny cannot be sustained for very long, is a cyclical expression...
...No one is upro-nuke," save perhaps those mirthless young people who accost us in airports...
...Around the world, and especially in the developed countries, where personal problems of daily survival do not exhaust the agenda, and where the immediate threat is clearest, the chorus of opposition to the present trend is growing...
...It is, instead, an infinitely complex choice between two ideas on how to preserve our planet, this ark...
...We offer, as well, an interview with Father Theodore Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame, a leader in virtually every part of the contemporary struggle for decency, for redemption, and most of all, these days, in the struggle for a better kind of peace...
...We are quite satisfied to stand with the scientists and arms control experts, with the physicians and the clergy who have studied the matter and have endorsed the freeze...
...But we regard it as a remarkable document, as much for what it teaches us of how serious religious people think and how useful such thinking can be as for what it says about the specific matters with which it is concerned...
...But that, say the anti-freeze people, is precisely what they seek to avoid, by insuring so powerful and so survivable a nuclear arsenal that all enemies would be deterred from attack...
...We mean no offense if we say that the bishops' letter is a very Jewish document, for it wrestles quite openly with the difficult issues of security and deterrence and justice and peace, and how these bear upon each other...
...But that is more a testimony to our protective devices than to our confidence that tomorrow will happen...
...It has been fashionable to wonder why Jewish voices have been silent in the debate on nuclear policy...
...The risks of present policies are by now well-known...
...side, if you will, with the earnest deterrers, the sober scientists of force and counterforce who seek to mirv us to non-war, or choose instead the flower children who want to love us to peace...
...The other reason has to do less with future risks than with present costs...
...We reprint here some few selected excerpts from the bishops' letter, in the hope that these will entice our readers to read it in its entirety...
...We believe, with the bishops, that it is time for a sustained "public moral dialogue" about these things, about our future and this planet's...
...The Editors...
...We think it healthy that at last so many people in so many places are no longer prepared to consent to so bankrupt a vision of human possibility as the doctrine of deterrence ultimately rests upon...
...We are quite satisfied to stand with, and for, our children...
...And others of us believe that the nuclear revolution requires a shift to a policy rrfore imaginative than deterrence—or, at the least, to a strategy of deterrence that can be pursued at lower levels of risk and cost...
...We are quite satisfied to be part of a growing movement that presses its government—and other governments—to come up with a better way...
...We have in mind what living with the threat of mutual wholesale slaughter does to us, and to our children...
...And in that debate, the thoughtful citizen is at a burdensome disadvantage, for the moment he steps across the threshold of the subject, he finds himself assaulted by technical claims and counter-claims that are nearly impossible to sort out, assaulted as well by a language that is esoteric, largely inaccessible...
Vol. 8 • July 1984 • No. 7
